


Lost Time

by Lissadiane



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Barney is the Worst, Canon Divergent, Clint's shitty childhood, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28340556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane
Summary: Clint’s always known the universe doesn’t like him all that much. But all he knows now, as his heart beats out a rhythm and there isn’t a heartbeat to harmonize with it, is that he’s found his soulmate -- and he’s been dead for over 70 years.It’s ironic. It burns. It shouldn’t surprise him.Barney won’t be surprised. Barney’s been saying the universe has it out for them for Clint’s whole life. And this is just further proof.In which soulmates exist but Clint's parents are proof that sometimes, they go terribly wrong.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 38
Kudos: 423
Collections: Winterhawk Wonderland - 2020 edition!





	Lost Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VexedBeverage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VexedBeverage/gifts).



> This is a pinch hit for the lovely [vexedbeverage](https://vexedbeverage.tumblr.com/). I really hope you like it and it was an honour being asked to step in and write for you. MERRY (day after) CHRISTMAS! Sorry it's a few hours late, the word count kinda got away from me there.

Lost Time

Clint Barton is nine years old and a ward of the state when he first understands just how absolutely fucked over by the universe he has been.

He’s been at this particular foster home placement for two weeks now -- just long enough to learn the layout of the house and make a half-hearted effort to remember his foster parents’ first names. Long enough to memorize his locker combination at school and actually pick up the books he’s gotta read in his language arts class for the rest of the semester, even though he knows he’s probably not gonna be here for that. 

A boy can dream, though, and Clint has gotten very good at dreaming.

They’re only this far from home, about an hour from Washington, DC, because Iowa had hoped that the “specialized services” in a larger urban centre might be beneficial to a case as difficult as Barney’s was proving to be.

His class is on a field trip - a real fucking field trip, with a posh bus, tinted windows, a washroom in the back, and Clint feels like he’s stepped onto a movie set somehow.

The world seemed so small back in Iowa. It was all farm fields and an endless sky, small towns and smaller minds, a rotting line of fence posts marking the edge of their county and just about as far as Clint could imagine ever getting to go.

The school bus had been caked with mud and was prone to breaking down, particularly in winter. It smelled of diesel and rotting food and dust and the shocks had worn out long ago.

This bus -- this bus smells of Fabreeze and the Hawaiian air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror and it’s a luxury Clint had never dared to imagine back in Iowa.

He’s not in Iowa anymore. He’s in Washington, D.C., and today, he and his classmates are going to the Smithsonian.

Clint’s not sure what that is but he knows it’s a big deal and he doesn’t want anyone to realize how ignorant he is by confessing he has never heard of it.. 

He’s excited though. Fuck, he’s excited. His dad never let him go on whatever field trips they managed to arrange back home, which were usually to grain elevators or dairy farms, because it always cost a few dollars for gas for the bus and his dad never saw the point.

But his current foster-mom -- Irene, her name is Irene, and she’s short and round and smells like apple pie and is so fucking sweet, Clint knows it ain’t gonna last -- signed his permission slip and paid his fee and gave him $20 to spend in the gift shop.

The motherfucking gift shop.

Clint clutches the money in one hand shoved into his jacket pocket to keep it safe. The only time he’s ever held this much money before was when his dad sent him on his bike into town with a note to buy cigarettes or whiskey.

The kids around him are bored. They’re fucking bored. They’re in a fancy bus with seats that are more comfortable than the couch Clint remembers from back home, driving through the capital city of the whole country, there’s not a cornfield in sight, and they’re complaining that they’re gonna get back home too late to watch their favourite shows or get a few hours of gaming in before bed.

Sometimes Clint feels like a completely different species from the kids his age.

But he stays quiet and small the way he learned to when he didn’t want anyone to notice him, and they talk over his head like he isn’t there at all. It gives him time to stare out the window with wide, starry eyes, staring at a city that’s bigger than his whole world had been back in Iowa.

The Smithsonian, it turns out, is a museum. Sort of.

Clint knows he’s been to a museum or two before. There were museums in Iowa. Whether it was the 4-H Schoolhouse, coal mining, windmill, hobo, pharmacist, matchstick, balloon or antique tractor museum, Clint has been to a few and he thought he knew what to expect.

Museums were dark and dusty with creaky, crooked floors and warped shelves overflowing with dirty old things that he’d probably still be able to find in the attic of his home. They smelled of mothballs and stale air and terrible taxidermy. They made him sneeze and gave him the creeps.

But the Smithsonian… was not that kind of museum. It’s sleek and spacious and big and airy and bright and takes Clint’s breath away.

They go on a tour. There’s so much to see and they stick to American history, so Clint learns about the star spangled banner and gets to see the First Ladys’ dress collection. He learns about Rosie the Riveter and all the presidents who’ve been assassinated. He itches to touch Indiana Jones’ whip but it’s locked up tight so he can’t, which is probably for the best.

And then they get to the Captain America exhibit and Clint… Clint never had much use for superheroes, but he knows about Captain America. Everyone knows about Captain America.

Clint tries to save his hero-worship for people who’ve actually done something to deserve it -- people like his mama, even though she’s dead, and people like Barney, who’s the only one left in the whole world who gives a damn about Clint anymore. 

He’s made a big show of not having time for fairy tales and superheroes and Santa Claus and whatever other bullshit the other kids his age believe in.

But sometimes… sometimes he lays awake and thinks about Captain America choosing to go down into the ice to save the world and he wonders what it was like and he can almost feel that aching cold in his bones because he knows he’d have done the same thing, to save his mother. Fuck the rest of the world -- but his mama deserved better than she got.

So standing here, in front of a line of sleek mannequins wearing different incarnations of Captain America’s suits, all backlit dramatically, looming over Clint who feels smaller than he has in a while, Clint has a bit of trouble catching his breath.

It feels important. It feels heavy. It feels bigger than his nine-year-old heart or hands can handle.

So he turns away, straightening his shoulders, and he’s going to tune back into whatever the tour guide his droning on about, he is -- but he gets distracted.

There’s another exhibit across the hall from Captain America’s costumes, this one about the Howling Commandos, and Clint has no idea who they are, but he’s drawn closer, gaze flickering over the infographics and images, the mannequins dressed up in outfits that are a lot less red, white and blue, a lot less spandex than Captain America’s.

He walks along the row, scanning each info card, learning about Dum Dum Dugan, Gabe Jones, James Falsworth, Jacques Dernier and Jim Morita. And then, at the end, he comes upon the memorial for Bucky Barnes.

Clint stares for longer than he means to at the film reel, at the shaky, black and white footage of Bucky Barnes, laughing, Captain America beside him.

The only Howling Commando to give his life during the war, Clint reads.

There’s a mannequin there too, dressed in a navy blue wool coat, and Clint glances over his shoulder at the tour group once to make sure they aren’t looking before he reaches out.

There are no locks, no display cases, no fences in the way. Just a rope barrier and, probably, some sort of alarm system, but Clint just has to -- just has to --

It almost feels like he knows the texture of that coat beneath his fingertips already and it makes no sense.

So he brushes his fingers against the hem of Bucky Barnes’ coat --

And the world shifts beneath his feet. It feels like an earthquake -- like standing too close when the tillage machine goes by, tearing up the earth. It feels like the world spins and shifts and he struggles to catch his balance but he stumbles, knocking into the rope barrier. An alarm starts blaring but Clint is too busy trying to breathe through the sudden sharpening of every sense he has, the sudden aching emptiness where there had only been a quiet anticipation before. 

It’s all sensory overload and feedback, an endless echo that’s meant to have an answer, but for each pulse of feeling, there’s nothing in reply and Clint’s always felt alone but never this alone before.

He starts to collapse as his teacher runs towards him. His knees turn to water.

Clint turns his head and pukes once and then he faints, passed out cold on the floor.

Clint’s always known the universe doesn’t like him all that much. But all he knows now, as his heart beats out a rhythm and there isn’t a heartbeat to harmonize with it, is that he’s found his soulmate -- and he’s been dead for over 70 years.

It’s ironic. It burns. It shouldn’t surprise him. 

Clint meant to stop believing in soulmates and fairytales around about the time he realized that the universe saw fit to link his mother to his father. He’d never quite managed it, though.

And he wants to laugh as consciousness slips away but he also wants to cry.

Barney won’t be surprised. Barney’s been saying the universe has it out for them for Clint’s whole life. And this is just further proof.

*

They don’t want to end the field trip early because the other kids would be so disappointed, so they clean up Clint’s mess and he spends the rest of their time tucked away in an office with an employee who clucks over him and gives him a juice box and a yogurt and tells him not to worry, she once fainted in the room with all the dinosaur skeletons and some people are just more sensitive than others and what happened to Steve Rogers was a goddamn tragedy and he oughtn’t be ashamed.

Clint just stays quiet and pale and small and eventually asks to go to the bathroom. The lady tells him how to find it and Clint listens carefully before disregarding everything she told him and going to the gift shop instead.

He spends forty minutes carefully browsing everything in the store, his $20 bill going clammy in his hand, and then finally picks out a replica of Bucky Barnes’ dog tags with his unit and badge number on it.

His fingers tremble as he pays for it, using up nearly every penny Irene gave him that morning.

When the rest of his class find him waiting on the bus, he’s already got the dog tags around his neck, tucked under his shirt.

*

The thing about soulmates is that not everyone finds theirs. And sometimes they do find their soulmate and something has happened to their soulmate along the way and left them bitter and scarred and angry and addicted to alcohol and violence and prone to taking it out on whoever’s closest -- and soulmates are, by definition, closest.

That was Clint’s mother and father. They met in high school -- his mother, a daydreamy, creative and naive girl who wanted to go off to college and study art and his father, barely showing up for class, barely passing, barely sober enough to remember to write his name on the top of the tests he did show up for.

He’d showed up for English class without a pen one day, Clint’s mom offered him one, he laughed and slapped it out of her hand, and that was it. They knew. 

A soulmate recognizes a soulmate when they touch something their soulmate has touched, something that belongs to them. It’s a connection, waiting to be made, waiting for the final piece of the circuit to start a feedback loop.

And it was Clint’s mom’s shitty fucking luck that her soulmate found her at all.

And it’s Clint’s shitty fucking luck that apparently, his soulmate died in the second world war.

But Clint is only nine. And he never had much use for love. All it did was get his mama killed. And it sure as hell never did anything for him.

So maybe this is for the best. Maybe this means Clint is safe from making decisions that will get him killed all because the universe decided that he was Meant To Be with someone who, for all Clint knew, could be crazy or mean or more work than they’re worth.

He’s safe, he tells himself, curled up on the bus, forehead against the window, fist closed around the dogtags. All this means is that there won’t be anybody with expectations they can put on him. He’ll never let anyone down if there’s no one there to be let down.

It’s just him. And Barney. And they’re gonna be fine.

He holds the dog tags so tightly, they leave marks on the palm of his hand.

*

Clint and Barney last three weeks in Irene’s foster home, which is two and a half weeks longer than they lasted in their last foster home. It’s almost a record.

It’s not Irene who changes her mind, though. Barney gave her plenty of reason to change her mind -- he has gotten incredibly good at making well-intentioned foster parents cry. She seemed determined to do her best, though. To get through to Barney despite how difficult he made it. She reassured Clint over and over again that he’d always have a home with her, that she’d take care of him, that she’d never send him back into the system.

So Barney eventually gave up and hatched a new plan that meant disappearing into the dead of night with only a backpack of extra clothes and heading north, hopping trains and hitchhiking and Clint, of course, went along gamely because Barney was his big brother and all he had in the world.

So they ran away and joined the circus.

*

Circuses, Clint learns, are basically a collection of misfits like him, which is nice at first, until it’s not.

It’s a sort of found family, one made up of clowns and acrobats, psychics and lion tamers. There is a sense of loyalty there, a feeling of us-against-the-world, and Clint had gotten so used to it just being him and Barney against the world, the feeling goes to his head and his heart.

He will do anything and everything for the circus. Anything they want from him. He is so desperate to prove that he is worth the space he takes up in the trailer he shares with Barney, that Clint is willing to do anything he’s asked to do.

He learns how to take down and set up the big top, how and what to feed the lions, the ponies, the small pack of guard dogs they let loose after closing up for the night. He learns how to run the ticket booth, the popcorn maker, the loudspeaker and the churro machine. He learns to work the doors and work the stands and work the crowd, becoming one of the most skilled pickpockets in the circus.

It itches at first, a sense of unease because he knows his mother would never approve of theft, but it’s stealing to survive -- to eat and to pay for the roof over his head and the gas in his vehicle. And the people he steals from don’t need it. They’re rich enough to pay too much for a ticket to the circus, a soggy corn dog, and stale popcorn.

And Clint needs it because the more money he turns in at the end of the night, the bigger the smile he gets from the Swordsman.

He’s training to be an archer with Barney, and Clint’s already better. Sometimes he throws a shot or two because if he beats Barney too badly, Barney gets angry and violent and a little too much like their father, and Clint’s still dealing with the lingering effects his dad’s anger and violence had on his hearing. He doesn’t want to learn what hearing he’s got left.

But he discovers something he never had before, with a bow in his hand and a target in front of him. There’s a sense of stability, of peace, of knowing exactly what is expected of him and how to move his hands, feet, body to meet those expectations. Every breath is perfectly timed, a perfect puzzle piece in his chest. Every brush of wind is accounted for. Every quirk in his arrow, every twitch of his muscles. Everything matters to the trajectory of the arrow but Clint just knows, he feels it.

It’s like he’s been shooting for decades, like his hands and his lungs and his arms know what to do, he knows what to do, and he knows he’ll hit his target no matter what because it just makes sense the way nothing else makes sense.

Holding a bow and an arrow and staring down a target makes Clint not feel as alone as he felt ever since he visited the Smithsonian.

It echoes like muscle memory, like he imagines his soulmate’s heartbeat would echo if he hadn’t died so long ago.

Bucky Barnes, he knows, was a sniper.

Too bad the world doesn’t have any use for snipers now.

*

It’s a small step from picking pockets to slipping into vehicles in the parking lot and rummaging for valuables, and Clint barely stumbles as he and Barney take that step.

And from there, it’s almost easy to move on to climbing through unlocked windows in the fancier houses in the towns the circus stops in, searching through jewelry boxes and looking for safes.

The more he brings back to the Swordsman, the more the Swordsman wants, but Clint is good at this. He’s quick and quiet and strong and he’s never felt needed the way he feels now.

So he takes and he takes until his pockets are full and he’s weighed down by diamonds and a lingering sense of guilt because his mama wanted so much better for him than this.

But it’s slow and it’s careful and it’s easy to justify. Just a little more, just a little worse, just a little farther into darkness, step by step, because they need to eat and gas up their cars and the circus isn’t making as much anymore because it’s coming on winter and Clint needs to prove he’s worth keeping around.

And then. And then. And then, Clint finally, finally hesitates.

There is a girl on her knees, all wide brown eyes and freckles and a mouth that’s trembling. She wasn’t supposed to be home. The whole family had gone out to the opera or something, were supposed to be gone for hours, but this girl, apparently, isn’t family. She’s a stepchild, a half child, something not quite blood, and they’d left her behind with a list of chores to do while they’re away and it’s very Cinderella.

Except Cinderella never surprised a band of merry thieves in her evil stepmother’s walk in closet, hands filled with heirloom jewels and Coach purses.

“I won’t tell,” she says, eyes burning. “I won’t tell anyone. Just please don’t hurt me.”

They’re fine, Clint reassures himself. They’re wearing masks and it’s dark and this girl has no idea who they are. They’ll slip away and disappear and no one’ll ever catch on. It’s fine, fine, fine.

“Take care of her,” the Swordsman says, and for a moment, Clint wonders what he means. Get her a blanket, make her some tea, call someone for her, stay with her until she stops shaking?

And then the Swordsman is pressing a gun into Clint’s hand and Clint didn’t know they were armed with anything more than the Swordsman’s utility knife and Barney’s bow.

His hands and his feet go cold, his face goes clammy, and he takes the gun with numb fingers, staring at the Swordsman and the girl and the weapon in his hand.

“What,” he says.

“Please,” the girl whispers. “Please, please no.” She’s started to cry.

“Kill her. Can’t leave a witness,” the Swordsman grunts and then he walks out of the closet, dismissing the girl as collateral damage.

Clint might not know a lot. He never finished school and doesn’t have much time for reading or learning on his own. He doesn’t know much about who he is or what he wants from life. But one thing he knows is that he’s not a killer.

He doesn’t hesitate. He isn’t conflicted. His mother didn’t raise him to kill and he’s not gonna start now, so he waits until the Swordsman is down the hall and then says quietly, “Run. Out the front door. The neighbour on your right is home. Go around into their backyard, where it’s dark, and knock on their door. Quick and quiet.”

“You’re not gonna kill me?” she whispers.

“I’m not a killer,” he tells her and she nods wildly, tear-streaked face shining like gold, and then she’s gone, quick as a jackrabbit and barely making a sound.

Clint waits until he hears the front door quietly close behind her and then clumsily opens the gun, taking the bullets out and shoving them in his pocket.

He finds the Swordsman and Barney in the garage, trying to hotwire a car that costs more money than Clint’s seen in his entire life.

The Swordsman looks up, eyes narrowed, and he says, “I didn’t hear a shot.”

“A shot?” Barney echoes. “Why would there be a shot? Clint, what did you do?”

“Don’t think he did what I told him, which is all that matters,” The Swordsman says.

“She got away,” Clint says, struggling to sound apologetic. “I lost her in the dark.”

“Did you,” says the Swordsman, and it doesn’t sound like a question. He jerks the gun out of Clint’s hand, shoves it down the back of his pants again, and Barney finally gets the car fired up.

He whoops, climbing into the driver’s seat and the Swordsman takes the passenger seat, leaving Clint to climb into the back. It’s a convertible and Barney lowers the roof while the garage door opens and just as he eases the car out onto the street, they hear the distant sound of sirens.

“Go,” the Swordsman says, terse, and Clint wants to tell him that this is a bad idea. This car is so recognizable, what are they gonna do, chop it up for parts? None of them are mechanics. They can’t sell it. It’s probably got a tracker on it.

But Clint’s too busy shaking and worrying about how much trouble he’s in to care.

The car is fast and quiet and they slip away into the darkness, leaving the affluent subdivision behind and heading out on the highway. The police don’t follow and Clint starts to gradually, carefully relax.

After they’ve left the city behind, when the car is swallowed up by the thicker darkness of the country, the Swordsman quietly directs Barney to turn off the highway, onto a dirt road that winds alongside a field of wheat. It’s not quite the corn from back home, but it reminds Clint of it enough that he feels a lonesome sort of ache in his chest, remembering running through corn fields with his mama and Barney when they were small.

“Stop here,” the Swordsman says, and there’s nothing here but wheat, rustling in the breeze, and the moon burning above.

When the sound of the engine dies out, Clint almost expects silence, but instead, he can hear so many crickets, the sound of the wind in the wheat, the distant calls of owls.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath and doesn’t wonder what they’re doing out here or what’s gonna happen because Clint might not know much, but he’s not stupid.

“Get out,” the Swordsman says, and Barney is oblivious, babbling away about all the goods they got away with, how clean it was, how pleased the rest of the circus is going to be, how much more lucrative theft is than legit circusing.

Clint just gets out of the car quietly, walking along the side of the road. He isn’t nervous. Scared, a little, but not scared enough to cry or to beg. There are worse ways this could have gone. 

He wonders if it’ll hurt. He wonders if Barney’ll care. He wonders if it’ll be fast. He wonders if there’s an afterlife and if he’ll find Bucky Barnes there.

When he feels the gun press against the back of his head, he stiffens his shoulders, holds his dog tags tightly in one hand, and stares out over the black sea of wheat.

Barney’s voice trails off and he says, nervous, “What are you doing?”

“Taking care of loose ends,” the Swordsman says, and he pulls the trigger.

There’s a hollow click and no pain at all. Clint swallows hard and the Swordsman swears, vicious and furious, and then he says, “Get your bow. Take care of him.”

Clint’s eyes go wide and his breath stammers because it’s too harsh, it’s too ironic, to die by an arrow when learning to shoot his bow was the only thing that’s ever made him feel alive.

“My bow?” Barney says, and Clint spins around, staring at him. He thinks Barney’ll argue. He won’t want to do it. But after a long moment, Barney grabs his bow and an arrow from the car and comes back to stand in front of Clint, half a dozen paces away.

Clint holds his dog tags more tightly and says, “Barney.”

“Sorry,” Barney says, and then he clears his voice when it wobbles. “Sorry, baby bro. I’m just doing what I’m told.”

The arrow slams into Clint’s shoulder, tearing the wind from his chest and spinning him halfway around. He doesn’t scream, he’s too startled by the white hot pain to scream, but he makes a punched out-pained sort of grunt as the world blinks out into bright white agony.

Before his knees give out, another arrow punches through his other shoulder, and by the time his knees hit the ground and his vision starts coming back, the car is already just a speck of light in the distance.

It hurts to breathe and to think and he can’t get the arrows out of his shoulders and he’s going to bleed to death here, alone in the dark, but Clint’s still got his hand wrapped tight around Bucky Barnes’ dog tags and he’s not afraid.

He’s about to die but he’s not a killer and that’s all that matters.

*

Clint doesn’t die. But he does become a killer.

It puts food on the table and pays for a roof over his head and he gets to choose which contracts he takes, so it doesn’t hurt the way he thought it would.

He still doesn’t regret letting that girl go, because now, he gets paid to take out assholes and human traffickers and other killers, and that makes him almost a superhero.

*

“Soulmate in the military?” Natasha asks him, the first time she sees the dog tags around his neck. They’re in a hot tub together on the roof of a swanky hotel in Dubai.

Clint grabs the dog tags and they fit in his hand like a puzzle piece and he says, “Something like that.”

He and Natasha have been working together for six months now and he’s still not sure how much he should trust her. He’s not even sure why she decided to work with him, especially after they met when he accepted a contract to take her out by a rival of the Red Room.

He’d almost done it, a long-distance shot, she’d have been dead before she knew it, but something about her pale face and wide eyes reminded him of that girl he let go back with Barney and the Swordsman and Clint’s not in the habit of killing teenage girls. He’d assumed the notorious Black Widow would be older.

So he’d dropped in on her and let her know about the contract and then went along with her to take out anyone involved with setting it up, and then he just… kept following her around.

And she didn’t seem to mind.

And it was nice, having a partner. 

“Dead?” she asks, and he stares at her blankly before she rolls her eyes a little and clarifies, “Your soulmate. Dead?”

“Yeah. I guess.” He clears his throat. “Yours?”

“Part of the Red Room’s recruitment tactics involve having any connection to our soulmates systematically destroyed,” she tells him matter-of-factly.

Clint’s eyes widen. “You can do that? Can you do that for me?” He’s tired of hazy, half memory nightmares of gunfire and blood and torture and screaming. If that’s all he gets to have of his soulmate, he doesn’t want it. Bucky Barnes is dead and Clint’s tired of feeling like he misses him.

“No,” she says, curt. “You wouldn’t survive the procedure. Most people don’t. And those that do…” She shrugs. “It involves removing certain components of the brain. And it hurts. And it never quite heals.”

He swallows hard and looks away and doesn’t bring it up again.

That night, they assassinate a crown prince and then disappear again and it’s easy. Clint’s hands don’t even feel bloody.

*

SHIELD finds Captain America buried in ice and defrosts him somehow and he’s still breathing and Clint… Clint stares at the tiny motel TV, riveted and cold and unable to breathe because if anyone was gonna survive and miraculously come back to life, why the fuck is it Steve Rogers and not Clint’s soulmate?

Clint pulls his knees to his chest and he’s 27 years old, he shouldn’t feel the way he felt when he was nine and puking on the floor at the Smithsonian. 

Natasha comes in, already tossing her posh jacket aside and tugging her blonde wig off, scowling a little and opening her mouth to report on her recon mission when she sees Clint’s face.

“Someone died,” she says, guarded.

Clint laughs a little. “No,” he says. “Kinda the opposite. They found Captain America frozen in some ice and he’s still alive.” He jerks his chin at the TV, where a secret agent in a fancy suit is standing in front of a huge and very patriotic American flag, reporting on the mission and Captain America’s condition.

“That’s Agent Coulson,” Natasha says, carefully tucking her wig aside before coming to sit near Clint on the bed.

“You know him?”

“He’s tried to recruit me to SHIELD a time or two,” she says, casual, like it’s not a big deal that America’s super secret spy agency wanted to bring her in from the cold. She’d probably get a fucking pension with a gig like that.

“And you said no?”

She looks at him. “Got tired of people telling me who to kill,” she says, and Clint understands that. Of course he does.

They watch the rest of the press conference in silence and when the breaking news bulletin is over and the nature documentary resumes, Clint doesn’t even realize he’s zipping the dog tags along their chain against his mouth.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Natasha tells him, shaking her hair out of its pins. “Big fan of Captain America?”

“He’s a national hero,” Clint says, distracted. 

Natasha hums a little skeptically and goes to shower. Clint tries his best to get back into the story of survival on the Savannah, but it’s hard and by the time Natasha’s back, emerging from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, Clint hasn’t caught a single thing that’s happened on the TV.

“I was just thinking,” she says, picking up the conversation where she left it. “If you’re such a big fan, I could call Agent Coulson.” She’s rummaging through her bag, wearing a towel, and drops a business card triumphantly on the bed. “I bet we’d get to meet Captain America if we joined SHIELD.”

“Why would we do that?” Clint asks her, cocking his head and feeling stupid and young. “You don’t want to and they don’t want me and I don’t want to meet him anyway.”

Natasha sighs and tugs the dog tags out of his grip, tucking them back under his shirt. “I’ll make you coming along a condition of my going at all,” she says. “I just thought…” She rests her hands against his chest, where his dog tags lay safely beneath his shirt. “If Bucky Barnes is supposed to be your soulmate, you’re never going to get to meet him. Maybe it’ll help if you at least get to meet someone who knew him.”

Clint doesn’t know how Natasha knows about Bucky. She never seems to miss anything, though. “How did you know?” he asks, quiet.

“You wear his dog tags with his name on them,” she says, rolling her eyes though her tone is gentle. “You call out for him in your sleep. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

“I don’t dream of him,” Clint lies. He’s been having wartorn dreams of gunfire and blood since he was a child. “And he died decades ago. It’s kinda far-fetched to think he could be my soulmate.”

She shrugs. “I’ve seen stranger things,” she says.

“But even if -- even if that was somehow possible -- why would you let someone else tell you who to kill again? For me?”

She looks at him like he’s disappointed her, tucking a wet lock of hair behind her ear. “I don’t have a soulmate,” she tells him. “And it seems to me the closest you’re going to get is by getting to know someone who knew yours.” She shrugs and looks away. “We’re friends. It’s not a big deal.”

Clint’s mouth is hanging open, he knows it is. “We’re friends?” he gasps, because he knew they were something -- coworkers, people in a symbiotic relationship where they work together to accomplish mutual murdery goals and make loads of money, something. He kinda felt like she let him follow her around and hang out near her and that was as good as he was going to get but he was willing to take it.

“What did you think we were?” she asks, frowning -- it almost looks like a pout, and it’s the first time she’s actually looked her age, all of 16.

“Friends,” he says quickly. “Of course we’re friends. But you don’t have to do this for me.”

She rolls her eyes and grabs her phone, dialing Coulson’s number without another word.

*

The biggest difference between being an Agent of SHIELD and a freelancer is the dental benefits. Clint’s teeth have never been so clean.

It takes a while for all the vetting, the psych exams, the physical exams and the interview process to wrap up before he gets to be an agent, and when he’s cleared for duty he moves into the compound for basic training. He had kinda hoped Natasha would get to be his roommate, but he supposes there are different accommodations for superstar new agents who also happen to be 16-year-old girls. 

He doesn’t see her often at first. He learns the routine, he works his way through the physical training, he gets fitter and stronger, he beats every high score in every shooting range they’ve got. He gets to know the other agents, warily at first and then with more enthusiasm as he finds a feeling of fitting in the way he hasn’t felt since his days in the circus.

He makes friends and a few enemies and his unit goes on a few field exercises and the entire experience soothes some subconscious part of him -- probably the part that’s been dreaming of the war since he was nine years old.

And eventually, Natasha is around more often, though her clearance levels are higher and she can’t talk about much of what she’s doing for SHIELD.

It’s not until Christmas that she’s able to introduce him to Captain America.

There’s a SHIELD Christmas party, very swanky, only for the upper-level officials and agents, and she gets to bring a plus one.

The party is in an elegant ballroom, Natasha dresses Clint up in a brand new tux, slicks his hair back, and dresses in an evening gown and heels that make her look much older than she is.

“Everyone’s going to think I’m a creep, showing up as your date,” Clint tells her, nervous and fidgety in the coat room, waiting for her to fix her hair before they head into the ballroom.

She shoots him a look and a wry smile and says, “Anyone who’s ever spent any time with me knows you’re in more danger from me than I am from you,” she tells him, slipping her arm into his and leading him towards the ballroom.

“You’re sixteen,” he tells Natasha, because sometimes he thinks she forgets.

“Seventeen,” she says, serene. “It was my birthday a while ago.”

Clint gapes at her, offended and horrified that he’d missed her birthday, wondering if they’re even friends at all, and then the doors swing open and he’s whisked into a glittering, golden world of superheroes and their disgustingly rich patrons and fans.

There are towers of shimmering glasses filled with champagne, servers wandering the crowd with trays of suspicious-looking bits of food, a jazz quartet playing something lively and Christmassy while a handful of couples dance like they’re in the movies. Everyone is dressed up and beautiful and shining and Clint feels awkward and rough and out-of-place.

And Captain America is the goldest, glitteriest one of all.

He’s near the dance floor, surrounded by a group of people who all seem to be talking to each other at once, reaching out to touch or take. They’re all beautiful and glitzy but their smiles seem sharp and their fingers grasping and Clint can’t help feeling a little bad for the guy.

Sure, he’s taller than most and clearly muscular enough to need a skilled tailor to keep his seams from splitting. He’s got his perfect, all-American face and cheekbones. His jawline that slayed a million Nazis.

But his smile looks forced and his eyes look distant and maybe a little pained and Clint suddenly wonders if maybe Steve Rogers is as awkward with this pageantry as Clint is.

“Natasha,” Clint says, soft, because she’s already pulling him on a meandering trail through the crowd towards Steve. “We shouldn’t tell him.”

She stops, studying his face for a moment. “But you wanted to meet him. To ask him about Bucky. That’s why we’re here.”

He winces. “I know. It’s just. We should wait. That’s a hell of a thing to drop on someone, right? Isn’t it?”

Her eyes narrow and Natasha purses her lips. “Fine,” she says, reaching up and gently untangling the dog tags he didn’t even realize he was playing with. She tucks them back into his shirt. “We’ll wait. But if we’re not here to join Captain America’s legion of adoring fans, then you’re going to have to dance with me to make this worth my time.”

Clint tosses back a glass of champagne with grim efficiency and lets her lead him to the dance floor.

He’s pretty sure she isn’t shocked to discover that he’s got two left feet and absolutely no rhythm, and she doesn’t seem to mind, teaching him complicated ballroom dance steps with more patience than his drill sergeants have.

It’s distracting. And even a little fun. He laughs more than he expected and so does she and it’s not even because they’ve had too much champagne.

Though they have, of course.

*

Clint thought getting shot and left for dead by his own brother was a nightmare. He thought hazy half memories of the war were nightmares. 

He had no concept of true nightmares until Loki.

It was a haze of icy blue obedience and mind-numbing cold. He was an automation, doing whatever he was told and telling Loki whatever he wanted to know. He had no conscience, no independent thought. He just did what was asked for him in a way that would have made the SHIELD drill sergeants proud -- snappy and obedient and without hesitation.

He killed on command and didn’t mind that his hands were drenched in blood.

And the worst part was how good it felt. Being absolved of any responsibility -- the world was so much lighter on his shoulders when he knew none of this was his fault. The world had made him into a monster and it was only fair that they had to deal with the creature they had made him.

It felt like breathing freely for the first time.

Of course, when it ended, all of the guilt and despair and anguish flooded into the shadows where only cold had been, weighing him down with the crushing force of the entire ocean.

He was heavy and he was still so cold and he was covered in the blood of his colleagues.

And somehow, he was accidentally an Avenger.

There isn’t much time to adjust to the new version of Clint who came out of Loki’s magic. There are monsters terrorizing Manhattan and suddenly, Clint’s inability to miss a target makes up for the fact that his weapon of choice is a bow and arrow.

After the aliens are dealt with and Loki is gone, Clint finds himself at Stark Tower with Natasha, Bruce, Tony, Thor and Steve.

It’s the first time he actually meets Captain America, other than that hazy moment after he woke up, free from Loki’s magic, and promised to fly a plane for him.

Thor has booze, the kind not meant for mere mortals, and Steve is, for possibly the first time, incredibly intoxicated.

And Clint hovers around, orbiting like an insecure moon, the dog tags under his shirt feeling hot against his chest. 

It’s the closest he’s ever going to be to his soulmate and Clint is terrified to take another step closer. If this is all he’s gonna get, he’s not ready to have it just yet and then have to face the fact that he’s not going to have any more of his soulmate for the rest of his life.

Finally, Natasha trips him, shoving him as she does, and sending him windmilling onto the couch beside Steve, who’s already healed up from the wounds he suffered fighting Loki and his alien army.

“Oof,” Clint says, struggling to right himself, and when he does, Steve is smiling at him, slightly lopsided but all charm.

“Barton,” he says. “You’re amazing. You blew so many of them right out of the sky.”

Clint’s not amazing. Clint’s still got the blood of his colleagues under his fingernails. But it feels raw and tender and he doesn’t know how to compartmentalize, so he swallows and does his best to ignore it and says, “You took out quite a few yourself, Captain America.”

Steve winces. “Call me Steve. Please. For fuck’s sake.”

Tony shouts about Steve’s language, laughing with an edge of hysteria from the bar and Steve gives him the finger and a coarse suggestion of just what Tony could do with his language and Clint stares, the picture perfect image of Captain America he’s had in his imagination since he was a kid crumbling in his mind.

He thinks maybe he likes the real version better.

“I knew you were top of all the shooting scores on the ranges,” Steve says, after Tony has been suitably dealt with. “But I didn’t know you were _that_ good.”

There’s a beat of silence. Clint is floundering and Steve is just sprawled there, lost in thought. It’s awful and awkward and then Natasha takes pity on him.

“Wasn’t your friend a sniper too, Steve?” she asks, and Steve rolls his head on the back of the couch to look at her.

“Oh,” he says. “Bucky.” He lets his head fall back so his eyes are staring up at the lights, shining with stars or tears, it’s hard to say. “Bucky was the _best_ sniper.”

“What was he like?” she asks, kindly.

Steve closes his eyes and smiles a little, flashing dimples before the expression fades away. “He was the best,” he says. “The best sniper. The best friend. The best guy I knew.”

Clint sits frozen, horrified and desperate to hear more all at once, and it seems like maybe Steve has just been waiting for someone to ask.

He talks and he talks and he talks. He tells them about growing up in Brooklyn with Bucky, about Bucky saving him from whatever fights he got himself into. Bucky taking care of him when Steve was injured or sick. Bucky taking care of him after he lost his mom. Bucky making sure Steve didn’t go hungry or cold, that he went along on dates as often as he could, even if the girls were rather reluctant to be on his arm instead of Bucky’s.

“A hopeless romantic,” Steve tells them. “Always told me that it wouldn’t matter, when I found my soulmate. She’d only have eyes for me and I just had to keep trying.”

“And did you?” Clint asks, and his voice comes out croakier than he had meant it to. He’s got his knees pulled up and he’s playing with his dog tags again, running them along the chain back and forth, just to feel the vibration in his fingertips.

“Find my soulmate?” Steve asks, brightening. “Yeah. Peggy.” His smile grows daydreamy and soft and he says, “When she touched my chest, after Project Rebirth, that was -- it was the first time either of us had touched anything belonging to the other. And it was instant. And so much stronger than whatever that serum did to me.”

“And Bucky?” Natasha asks. “Did he find his soulmate?”

Steve closes his eyes. “No,” he says, soft. “He died before he had the chance.”

Clint squeezes his eyes shut and wonders how it’s possible to feel this much grief for someone he’s never known, and if talking to Steve about Bucky was a mistake after all.

It feels like a mistake, deep in his gut. It feels like regret and longing and grief.

*

Clint means to tell him but he’s not sure how, or what purpose it would serve.

“Hey, Steve, you’re old pal Bucky Barnes was meant to be in love with me, isn’t that weird? Any chance he slipped into some ice and froze for decades and we can go find him? No? That’s weird, because sometimes I dream of gunfire and other times I dream of falling and cold, cold, cold.”

He doesn’t say it. Steve doesn’t need to know. But it grows heavy and Clint starts working with his SHIELD unit again when he can, because distance helps him keep his shit together.

He’s in Barcelona when The Winter Soldier attacks Fury and Steve, though he doesn’t find out about it at first. Not until later --

Not until after The Winter Soldier and Steve have a showdown on a bridge, dozens of civilians at risk on either side. It’s a brutal battle, caught by shaky cell phone cameras and broadcasted all over the world and Clint watches from Europe. It’s the closest battle he ever sees Steve engage in and it’s hard to breathe, just watching. He wants to be there, to help.

And then Nat gets shot and Clint starts packing his shit because he’s flying home right now and no one’s gonna stop him.

He misses the footage of Steve knocking the Soldier’s mask off, though he wouldn’t have recognized the man underneath it anyway.

*

It takes nearly a day to get home because flying economy sucks and his unit wouldn’t let him take the jet. 

“Clint,” Natasha says, faint and feverish, high on painkillers. She’s not even in a hospital - they’re in a bunker somewhere because SHIELD, apparently, is compromised and nothing makes fucking sense anymore. Someone could have told him before he ran off to Barcelona with them, for fuck’s sake.

But he can’t be mad at Natasha for it. It’s not her fault she’s got higher clearance than him, especially after the shit show with Loki.

So he takes her hand and squeezes it and says, “I’m here, you’re fine, if I’d have been watching your back, that never would have happened.”

She stares up at him, eyes bright and burning with intensity, and says, “Watch the footage, Clint. You need to see.”

“I saw it live,” he says, smoothing her hair back. “I saw what happened. Is Steve okay?”

“Clint,” she says again, clutching his hand. “Clint, it was Bucky.”

It feels the way it felt when he was nine, brushing his fingertips against the hem of Bucky’s blue wool coat. The ground under his feet shifts somehow, becomes less stable. He feels sick to his stomach and can’t catch his breath. He can’t believe it’s true but can’t figure out why it would be a lie.

Steve came back from the dead. And maybe Bucky did too.

He doesn’t puke this time, which is a small miracle.

*

They’ve gathered all the security and cell phone footage of the fight on the bridge, and the other one on the rooftops in Brooklyn. It was dark then, so it’s harder to see, but Clint watches the clips a dozen times. The clearest thing he can see is the moment when Steve throws his shield and the Soldier, without hesitation, without even looking, reaches out and catches it before it makes impact.

He watches the bridge battle again and again, until seeing Natasha get shot no longer makes him flinch.

He watches all the way to the end, when Steve knocks the mask off the Soldier’s face and Bucky Barnes is standing there on the road.

“Bucky?” Steve asks.

“Who the hell is Bucky,” the Soldier says.

The footage cuts out.

Clint watches it again. And again. And again.

He needs to tell Steve.

*

Clint intends to. Really. He plans on tracking Steve down and confessing, “Bucky is my soulmate, I don’t know why or how, but please let me help you and don’t let anyone hurt him.”

Unfortunately, Captain America is very busy rooting out the traitors in SHIELD and dealing with the fact that there are massive helicarriers nearly ready to launch and shoot millions of people from the sky before they have a chance to fuck up HYDRA’S plans.

It’s crazy. It’s like Loki all over again only Clint doesn’t have that same self-satisfied sensation of knowing exactly what’s expected of him. Even if it ends up causing mass casualties for his team.

And he hasn’t got the clearance, which is the most frustrating part. Sure, he’s an Avenger. Accidentally. But he’s not Captain America or Iron Man or Thor or Natasha, so the meetings happen without him and he has no idea what’s going on.

So when the team loads up a van with weapons and equipment and prepares to set off for the Triskelion, Clint does the only thing he can think of to do and sneaks into the back of the vehicle.

*

Clint slips out of the van and into the Triskelion while everyone else is busy planning whatever complicated operation they’ve come up with to take down the helicarriers.

He trusts them to take care of it. He’s not going to get in the way. He just needs to find Bucky before anyone gets hurt and somehow… somehow fix him.

His plans are a little hazy. 

The first step -- finding Bucky -- doesn’t go according to those hazy plans. Apparently Clint’s SHIELD unit is full of traitors and assholes and Clint gets held up in a firefight with them in the cafeteria.

They’ve got guns and he’s got his bow and the good thing about his bow are the number of trick arrows he’s developed with SHIELD’s full range of financial and research backing.

Bullets can tear through tables and walls, sure, but Clint’s got flash arrows and gas arrows and stink arrows and he takes out his whole unit in twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes is a long time on a heroic rescue mission, however, and when Clint finally finds Bucky, it’s much, much too late.

People have already gotten very hurt. Steve’s face is broken and bleeding, his suit has bullet holes in it, with blood leaking sluggishly.

And Bucky… Bucky is bruised and broken and bloody and their vicious fight continues, over, around and under the power unit Clint is pretty sure Steve is meant to be dealing with.

“Steve,” Clint says, urgent, because they’re running out of time. “Don’t hurt him.” Clint is too far away and too ordinarily human to get up where they are and he’s running out of options.

It distracts Steve for a moment and Bucky gets a fierce blow in, knocking the wind out of him and sending Steve tumbling down, only to catch himself on the scaffolding holding the power unit up.

“Clint,” Steve says, gasping, swinging from the metal bar he landed on. “Get out of here. This isn’t your fight.”

“Deal with the helicarrier,” Clint tells him, his voice calm and smooth and not breaking at all. It’s a fucking miracle.

He pulls an arrow out of his quiver and slips it into his bow, staring up at the platform above where Bucky is standing, breathing heavily, glaring down at Steve as blood runs from his split lip.

“Clint,” Steve says. “Don’t --”

“Millions of people will die, Steve,” Clint says, measured and even.

Steve hesitates and then swears, vicious and heartbroken as he scrambles up the scaffolding towards the power unit.

And Clint just keeps replaying that bit of footage in his mind, the grainy image of the Winter Soldier, sprinting across a rooftop and turning and catching Steve’s shield without a moment’s hesitation.

“Please,” he says quietly, drawing a deep breath, drawing the bow.

Bucky isn’t paying attention -- he’s already turned away to deal with Steve, who’s nearly reached the platform, and Clint doesn’t let himself hesitate.

He breathes out and as he does, he releases the arrow.

It flies straight and true, like Clint knew it would, because he doesn’t seem able to miss. It’s going to slam into Bucky’s back, between his vertebrae, severing his spinal column and probably puncturing a lung.

It seems like the arrow flies in slow motion and Clint can’t do anything but watch and hold his breath.

At the last possible second, Bucky spins, smooth and lethal, and grabs the arrow in midair, a few inches away from tearing through his skin and bone.

He grabs it with his metal hand and, for a long moment, Clint can only think that the plan didn’t work. He’s fucked, he thinks. They’re both fucked. He fucked this up. He fucks up everything, why should this be a goddamn surprise?

And then Bucky flips the arrow to his other hand and spins it, lifting it and ready to launch it back at Clint. A second later, his back arches and his body goes stiff, like he’s been electrocuted. He makes a sharp, pained sound and his fist clenches around the arrow, cracking the shaft.

He looks dizzy and sick, like the earth just shifted beneath his feet, and Clint wants to fall to the ground and cry because he knows what that feels like, he remembers the feeling of wool beneath his fingertips, and this is it. This is confirmation. 

Since he saw the footage, Clint hasn’t wanted to believe that somehow, Bucky is still here. But now, as the connection tears through Bucky and rips open all the scarred and broken parts where Clint should have been all along, it’s proof. It’s verification. It’s an answer to the echo that’s been in his own heart since Clint was nine years old.

But Bucky just starts screaming and screaming like his brain is being torn to pieces.

Clint isn’t stupid, though he doesn’t know much. He had a contingency, in case grabbing Clint’s arrow didn’t open their bond.

It’s a tranquilizer arrow and Clint activates it quickly because the screaming is harsh and pained and he can’t stand to hear it.

He flinches when Bucky passes out and falls to the floor, a storey and a half away, but the screaming stops and Steve gets the helicarrier shut down before millions of people are murdered, and Clint’s willing to take it as a win.

*

The Triskelion is falling to pieces and Steve just grimly says, “C’mon. Help me with him. And explain when we’re in the car.”

They manage to drag Bucky down to the parking garage, throwing him into the van. The tranq won’t keep him out for long, but they should be able to get him somewhere safe and secure before it wears off.

“Where are we going?” Clint asks as he does up the seatbelt.

“Somewhere HYDRA won’t find him,” Steve says. “Or SHIELD either.”

As Steve takes the highway, driving way too fast, Clint tells him everything.

He cries a little while he does, but it’s been so long since he’s cried, he doesn’t know what else he expected.

*

They go to Sam Wilson’s house. It’s a cute, quiet place in the suburbs with a quaint guest room where they keep Bucky, sedated with drugs Thor brought from Azgard, and adamantium shackles on his wrist.

It’s a strange place to keep a brainwashed super soldier/notorious assassin and a strange place to have a complete breakdown, but Clint doesn’t have much choice in the matter.

He does his best to stay balanced and in control but his soulmate is back from the dead and a murderous evil assassin cyborg -- he’s gonna need some time.

Natasha gets a copy of Bucky’s file from HYDRA and Clint shouldn’t look but he does, reading over everything that was done to him. So much of it echoes in his mind like the recurring nightmares of cold and pain and torture. Clint slams the file shut and spends a few minutes puking in the bathroom, before going back to sit beside Bucky again.

Bucky hasn’t woken up since they started him on Thor’s drug cocktail, but he tosses and mumbles in his sleep, broken bits of sentences that make Clint want to find HYDRA and kill them all over again.

The only time he’s calm is when Clint is sitting next to him, so he does that as much as he can.

Thor and Steve have gone off to Wakanda to find help.

And Clint just keeps watching and waiting and trying to figure out how this whole thing defines the way the world works for him.

He was so used to having a dead soulmate. He doesn’t know what to do with an evil one instead.

*

It takes Shuri twenty minutes to remove the damage HYDRA spent 70 years inflicting. And she acts like it’s easy.

They wean Bucky off the drugs after that but he continues to sleep for three long, long days. When he finally wakes, Clint is sitting beside his bed, playing with the dog tags, nearly delirious with exhaustion, and at first, he doesn’t even notice.

“I remember this,” Bucky says, voice hoarse, cracking, and he reaches out with his free hand to touch the dog tags Clint’s got wrapped around one hand.

“Bucky,” Clint says, uncertain, ready to call out for Steve or a doctor or anyone at all.

Bucky’s eyes are still hazy with leftover drugs and whatever Shuri did to him, but they’re wide and gray and human, not lost and distant the way they’d been before.

He’s looking at Clint like he’s struggling to place him, like he knows his name, it’s on the tip of his tongue.

“It was in my dreams,” Bucky says hazily. “Saw it whenever I closed my eyes.” He traces a fingertip over his name, and then his unit and badge number. “So I remembered who I was, until they cut it out of me.”

The chain has started cutting off his circulation and Clint swallows hard as he unwraps it, hanging it back around his neck.

“I dreamed of you,” he tells Bucky. “And what they did.”

Bucky grimaces. “Sorry.”

Clint laughs a little but it sounds a bit sharp. “It was probably worse for you.”

Bucky hums a little bit, eyes drifting shut slowly, and he reaches out his hand again, taking Clint’s this time. It’s an electric shock, a feedback loop, but it doesn’t hurt, like it did when Clint touched his coat. It’s a circuit completing itself, a soothing rush of warmth and electricity that whispers rather than burns.

“I looked for you,” Bucky whispered, fighting sleep, and Clint leans forward, folding his free arm on the edge of the mattress, resting his chin in the crook of his elbow. “Everyday. Before they took me.”

“Sorry you had to come so far to find me,” he says, blinking back stupid tears and trying to make it sound like a joke.

Bucky forces his eyes open, blinking sleepily at Clint and then smiling, that same sweet smile Clint remembers from the old footage at the Smithsonian.

“We’ve just gotta make up for lost time,” he says, holding tight to Clint’s hand as he drifts off to sleep.

“Yeah,” Clint whispers, closing his eyes, breathing deeply for the first time in a long time -- maybe years. “I guess now we’ve got time.”

The End


End file.
